The academic, who is a
Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at City, gave her views on
the development of police transparency, drawing on her experience from 12 years
working within the Metropolitan Police Service.

Are we shoring up an institution for the institution’s sake and not for the
people’s sake?Professor Betsy Stanko OBE

She said there was now
“much greater transparency” than when she started researching UK policing in
1982, with many statistics now available online in formats like interactive
crime maps.

However, she believes
more work needs to be done to help the public understand what crime figures reveal
about police performance and how problems are being tackled.

“I’d like for us to be
able to be even stronger in our requirement that our democratic institutions
work for us and that we find a way to challenge practice in a way that gets
behind and underneath the transparency, which is just beginning to happen,” she
said.

“That transparency, I
think, is still surrounded in a myth of an institution that we believe and hope
works for us.”

The CLJJ is the first major interdisciplinary centre in the UK to
develop a broad yet focused interface between law, justice and journalism in
society.

The centre aims to
harness and maximise opportunities for research collaboration, knowledge
transfer and teaching to become a centre of excellence.

There has been a major
transformation with policing and it has happened in a very short period of
timeProfessor Betsy Stanko OBE

Professor Stanko, who is well-known for her research, particularly into rape and sexual violence, asked whether
transparency was being used to protect public bodies or to serve the
public more effectively.

She said: “Are we
actually improving grounded practice in a way that is going to change things? Or
are we shoring up an institution for the institution’s sake and not for the
people’s sake?”

The academic said the
current UK government had made significant efforts to increase transparency and
called the progress in police professionalism the biggest ever change in
policing.

“In particular, this
government has put a real push in and I think there are things that are
happening now that did not exist in 1982 when I started to work in Britain,” she
said. “They certainly did not exist in the seventies and eighties when I was
working in the United States.

“The thought of getting
any information about crime and criminal justice, aside from numbers every year
in the annual crime statistics registers, was very, very rare.”

She added: “Who would
have thought that it would be the Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition that would
have brought the biggest change to policing ever in our lifetimes, and in the
history of policing?

“There has been a major
transformation with policing and it has happened in a very short period of
time. The transformation is being felt by police officers, as they transform
what they do for a living.”

Professor Stanko also
said:

The mobile phone is a “weapon of transparency”
that has empowered the public

“Disquiet” among the public is helping to
improve transparency

Professor Stanko said she never could have expected the extent to which police admitted failures
after the Hillsborough disaster. She described the admission as “unbelievable” and said findings of the enquiry
into the 1989 tragedy were “absolutely stunning”.

Professor Chris Greer, Co-Director
of the CLJJ and Head of the Department of Sociology at City, added: “Professor
Stanko was a pioneering researcher of violence against women through the 1970s
and 1980s and has since become one of the key policing and criminal justice policy
players in London.

“We are absolutely delighted to have Betsy working with
us as we continue building criminology at City.”

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